Many businesses are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon at the moment, whether it’s to promote new services or interact directly with their customers on a one-to-one basis.

However, the problem with many companies are the restrictions of firewalls to avoid heavy abuse of social network use by untrustworthy staff members.

I realised this morning you don’t need to visit twitter.com to manage the your Twitter account – there are plenty of other web-based Twitter applications setup which are unlikely to be listed in the firewall’s blacklist, essentially acting as a proxy to access Twitter’s services indirectly.

Here are a few to try out:

Br.st

Very well designed and simple to use interface with additional multimedia functionality.

Twithive

More focussed on lists and channels of activity streams.

Brizzly

The added benefit of connecting with Facebook as well

Seesmic

Web-based version of the popular Twitter desktop application

There are also a selection of web-based Twitter apps intended as mobile web apps but work perfectly well on the desktop, especially in a sidebar of your browser:

Dabr
Slandr
Hahlo

Try a few to see which one you prefer – each have their own perks.

On a sidenote, if you haven’t already, install a “decent” browser like Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera or Safari. All these browsers are far superior to the corporate preference of Internet Explorer and tend to cope better when it comes to web-based apps.

Many of these also have the ability to enhance the browser with extensions and addons to interact with social networks (although you may still encounter firewall issues with these). You may also find that most company policies don’t allow you to install software but it wouldn’t hurt to ask your friendly IT department for some assistance.

It’s a new year so time for another season of sports fixtures, all delivered directly to your calendar applications.

Over the last few years, you may have noticed I’ve been building quite a collection of sports-related calendar services which allow you to download or subscribe to certain sports fixtures throughout the year, making it easier to organise your social life. This year is no different.

6 Nations

The first sporting event of the year we’ll be embracing is the 6 Nations rugby competition between the Home Nations (England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland), France and Italy. This all kicks off on Saturday 6th February 2010 between Ireland and Italy at Croke Park and continues through to Saturday 20th March 2010.

To make sure you don’t miss any fixtures, download or subscribe to the 6 Nations fixtures calendar. Not much has changed on the website since last year with regards to design or functionality but, if you have any ideas for improvements, don’t hesitate to send them through.

Formula 1

Just as the 6 Nations competition comes to an end, the Formula 1 season will be starting with the Bahrain Grand Prix in Sakhir on Sunday 14th March 2010.

Working with the talented Andy Higgs, we’ve now updated the website inline with the new season and you’re now able to download or subscribe to the Formula 1 season calendar for 2010.

We’ve got a few improvements planned for the user interface later in the year but, to make sure you don’t miss any of the schedule, the calendar is readily available.

UEFA Champions League & Europa League

Last year, a team of us including Brian Suda - the inspiration behind all these calendar services - worked directly with UEFA on a dedicated solution for delivering the entire fixture schedule as downloadable UEFA calendar files, for both the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Cup (now know as the UEFA Europa League). Users were also able to access individual club calendars to focus specifically on a club of interest.

The original service was so well received, UEFA were keen to build on the service and offered us an opportunity to extend the functionality for the new season. Our proposal for Phase 2 was well received by the organisation and their Media & Technology department so we are now in full swing on the improved system architecture and additional functionality, scheduled for a three phase rollout over the next six months.

Everyone involved in the project is really excited about some of the upcoming functionality and, hopefully, the large user demographic will enjoy it as much as we will.

World Cup 2010

On the 11th June, the biggest football tournament in the World starts in South Africa - World Cup 2010.

With the huge success of the original World Cup KickOff - the first sports-based calendar service we built - we would have been foolish to ignore this opportunity.

Work has already began on the updated solution with Gareth Brown (from One Black Bear) working on the user interface while Brian and I continue to work on the development.

We’re also lining up an interesting partnership with London startup which should add some really special value to the user experience. It’s too early to say at this stage but, needless to say, it is going to be exciting.

We’re planning to launch this project for May 2010, giving you a month or so to plan your World Cup social calendar. If we can release it sooner, we certainly will but it’s better to be realistic than optimistic some times - best follow @worldcupko on Twitter for updates

CakePHP is a great application framework for “developing rapid websites”. I’ve started building quite a few websites with the system and become quite fond of the MVC framework, the native built-in functionality and vast amount of support available.

When I came to setup an application on RackSpace Cloud Sites (previously known as Mosso), due to the unique way the server was configured (running both Apache and IIS simultaneously), CakePHP didn’t want to work straight out the box.

It was only after quite few hours of research and live chat from the hosting support team that I discovered there were several tweaks that had to be made for CakePHP to work on the Rackspace Cloud.

Basically, it all comes down to the .htaccess files and RewriteBase.

1. In the route .htaccess file, add the following line:

   <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteBase /
   # Cake Defaults
   RewriteRule    ^$ app/webroot/    [L]
   RewriteRule    (.*) app/webroot/$1 [L]
   </IfModule>

2. In the app folder, add the following line to your .htaccess file:

   <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteBase /app
   RewriteRule    ^$    webroot/    [L]
   RewriteRule    (.*) webroot/$1    [L]
   </IfModule>

3. In the app/webroot folder, add the following line to your .htaccess file:

   <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /app/webroot
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?url=$1 [QSA,L]
   </IfModule>

That should do it.

Google Calendar is a great cloud computing calendar solution which allows you to manage your calendar online, as well as invite others to shared events.

One feature Google Calendar is missing though is the ability to delete more than one event at a time. However, by using the remote calendar functionality Google Calendar offers, you can get around this.

(This solution uses iCal on OSX but you could use a similar approach with GooSync for Outlook if you’re on Windows.)

1. In iCal, select Preferences from the iCal menu.
2. Go to the Accounts tab and add a new account (+)
   
3. Select CalDAV from the Account Type then enter your Google username and password.
4. Enter the Server Address as google.com.
5. On the Server Settings, make sure the Server Path is set to /calendar/dav/[username]/user where [username] is your Google username.
6. You have now configured your Google Calendar to sync up with iCal.
7. If you have a mass of events with similar content that you need to remove, search for that term eg. “Morning Meeting”.
8. Select all the events and delete.
9. When iCal synchronizes with Google Calendar, all those events will be removed.